I wouldn’t say I’m an email power user but I know this guy who was complaining that his job meant he gets six emails every day. You and I have just had six emails since the top of this paragraph. So we are at least, shall we say, email-dependent. If I had to rely on phones alone, for instance, I wouldn’t be a fiftieth as productive as I am now. Which means it’s a big deal for anyone when their email isn’t working properly.
It’s worse when your company makes the email software you don’t want to use because it’s rubbish. Yahoo (does it still have the exclamation mark?) is having some trouble. AllThingsD details them and then says:
“They have also declined to return emails inquiring about the issue and others related to Yahoo Mail from this site for weeks, in perhaps the most astonishing display of PR incompetence I have experienced in a very long time.”
Harsh. But also a little bit funny: maybe they’ve been emailing back and it just hasn’t worked.
As with so many things, though, all this has happened before and all this will happen again. When Time/Warner bought AOL, probably the first sign that this was a calamitous mistake came in their email. AOL had an email service, naturally Time/Warner moved everyone over to it. You can’t sell an email service to customers if you won’t use it yourself. Very, very many Time/Warner staff wouldn’t use it. Because it was rubbish. Eventually, the firm relented and its staff could go back to whatever they had before. This wasn’t heavily mentioned in AOL publicity
Here’s AllThingsD’s article on Yahoo Mail today: